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Grandma, Cousin Billy, Christian Dior

LITTLE more than a decade ago, Stanley Marcus, the merchandising wizard who turned Neiman Marcus into the country’s leading luxury retailer, pulled up in a Cadillac at the Dallas residence of one of his 10 grandchildren and deposited nearly 35 years’ worth of personal photographs on the porch. He was moving from the home he had lived in for some 50 years and was clearing out the closets.

“He asked me if I wanted them,” said Allison V. Smith, a daughter of Mr. Marcus’s oldest child, Jerrie Marcus Smith. “Otherwise, he said he was going to trash them.”

Photo

FAMILY SLIDE SHOW Snapshots of Christian Dior, top, and Pauline Trigère.Credit
Photographs by Stanley Marcus

In total, there were more than 5,000 color slides, some in exquisite leather pouches, others in slide trays still marked with Neiman Marcus sales tags. They dated from 1936 (a year after the introduction of Kodachrome, when Mr. Marcus was entering his ’30s) to 1971 (around the time negative film became more popular).

Ms. Smith, a freelance photographer who has worked for several newspapers, including The New York Times, thought they should be preserved. But she did not recognize their real value until 2004, two years after Mr. Marcus died, when she posted dozens of his images, family portraits, landscapes and candids on the photo-sharing site Flickr.

Although the pictures were unlabeled on the site, hundreds of people began to comment on their content and the color-saturated aesthetic they shared with the society portraits of Slim Aarons. Some also recognized the international coterie of designers he brought to Dallas, including Pauline Trigère, Emilio Pucci and Christian Dior, who was photographed in his Paris apartment. Ms. Smith and her mother compiled some of the best work for a book produced for the store’s centennial last October, preceding an exhibition that opened on Wednesday at the Dallas Museum of Art.

“It’s not just the fancy people he knew,” Ms. Smith said, “but also children in Mexico and vendors in Italy — he loved everybody. He had a need to story-tell his life.”